Court Links Deaths to Samsung Plants

A South Korean court found a connection between working conditions at Samsung Electronics Co.’s chip manufacturing plants and the leukemia deaths of two workers, ordering a government welfare fund to pay compensation to the victims’ relatives.

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Samsung Electronics headquarters in Seoul, file photo.

The decision, announced Thursday, is an important one for judicial independence in South Korea, where Samsung is the biggest company by revenue, and employees and a government agency had already declared the deaths to be not workplace-related.

In its ruling, the Seoul Administrative Court said that though the precise cause of the workers’ illness wasn’t clear, “It can be construed that their exposures to dangerous chemicals and radiation were catalysts, at least.”

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It ordered the Korean Workers’ Compensation and Welfare agency to pay compensation. Samsung wasn’t a defendant in the case.

On similar claims made by three other workers, however, the court said that the evidence wasn’t enough to draw the same conclusion.

The leukemia controversy has been brewing for several years amid a growing number of reported cases among workers at Samsung’s chip factories. The company operates 16 fabrication lines in the Seoul suburbs, the densest concentration of chip factories anywhere in the world. It employs about 30,000 people at the sites.

The number of people who have been diagnosed with disease varies depending on the source. Samsung says that 10 chip-plant workers have died of leukemia or lymphoma since 1998, and 15 others have been diagnosed with the illnesses. A group of current and former workers puts the number at around 60, with 20 deaths. Another group says there are about 130 workers who have been diagnosed with leukemia.

Samsung last July commissioned Environ Holdings Inc. — a Washington, D.C., consulting firm with expertise in hazardous substances — to conduct a 12-month study of chemical handling at its South Korean factories. The company expects the report to be published next month.

In a statement after Thursday’s ruling, Samsung said: “The health and well-being of our employees is and will remain the top priority for Samsung. And we remain committed to providing the safest working environment for all our employees.”